New Zealand South Island (NZSI)For FSX and Prepar3D* Published Orbx Simulation
SystemsReviewed by Tim Arnot March 2012

Kia ora. Te Wai Pounamu o Aotearoa. Middle
Earth. Godzone. The Shaky islands. However you want to describe
it, this is New Zealand. I have been waiting for truly awesome
scenery coverage ever since I first visited the Land of the Long
White Cloud back in 2002. There have been a number of sceneries
covering the area over the years, many of them very good, but
they’ve either had a small coverage area, or been limited to mesh,
or landclass, vector replacement, specific airfields etc. Now Orbx
have come along with an “everything” scenery that covers, well,
everything. The question is, is it everything I ever wanted?

Overview
New Zealand is an island country, located in the southern
hemisphere, some 900 miles East of Australia. It is split into two
main islands, the North Island and the larger South Island, and
many smaller islands. Total area is 103,400 square miles, slightly
larger than the UK. Most of the country’s 4.4 million inhabitants
live on the North Island. The main languages are English and
Maori.

NZSI covers the South Island, Stewart Island and the Chatham
Islands.

The South Island is approximately 520 miles long, with
a maximum width of about 150 miles. It is split along its
length by the Southern Alps, the largest peak being
Aoraki/Mt Cook at 12,316ft.

The east coast is dominated by the Canterbury Plains,
while the rugged west coast is covered in temperate rain
forest. There are glaciers in the Southern Alps, the best
known of which are the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers.

There are spectacular fjords in the South,
extinct volcanoes in the East, and world-renowned wineries
in the North. The largest city, Christchurch is on the East coast,
close to the Banks Peninsula, and hit the news recently when it
was struck by a series of massive earthquakes.

In recent years, the spectacular scenery of New Zealand has
featured heavily in Hollywood feature films, with a starring role
in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe, The Last Samurai, and also the upcoming The Hobbit.

NZSI is available as a 3.03GB download for £27.76 ($43.73 US) from
the Flightsim Store, or as a boxed DVD for £29.12 + shipping from
the Flightsim Store and other resellers (reseller prices may
vary). This review covers the download version, patched to SP1.

Installation
The download and install process will be familiar to owners of
other Orbx products: Once the purchase has completed at FSS, you
can download the product from the link on the ‘My Account’ page.
You will be offered a choice of servers from around the world;
just go with whichever one is closest to your location. The MD5
checksum is provided on the download page, so you can check the
integrity of the file once downloaded (there are plenty of MD5
checker utilities available). Don’t forget to make a backup of
your downloaded file AND the email that contains the required
registration details.

Once the file has downloaded, you will need to unzip it, and then
run the installer. This will guide you through the rest of the
installation process.

Settings and Performance
Use of the scenery is controlled through the FTX Central control
panel. Before you start FSX, you will need to use this tool to
select the Oceania region (if you have previously installed any of
the Australian regions, you will see that ‘Australia’ in FTX
Central has now become ‘Oceania’, since it now includes New
Zealand).

If you have the wrong region set when you start FSX (don’t worry,
I’ve done it myself many times!) you’ll find all sorts of odd
problems with the scenery, from weird elevation problems to wrong
or missing textures. Don’t worry – you haven’t broken anything,
just shut down FSX, set the region in FTX Central and restart FSX,
you’ll then be right as rain.

The manual includes a detailed guide to configuring the FSX
Settings panels to get the best out of NZSI. I’ll give a quick
précis here, but obviously you should set up your own rig in
consultation with the manual.

LOD Radius

Large

Global Texture Resolution

Max

Mesh Complexity

100

Mesh Resolution

10m

Texture resolution

7cm

Scenery Complexity

Extremely Dense

Autogen Density

Normal

AI Traffic

16%

Road Vehicles

16%

This is what they regard as a “Base setting” for medium-spec PCs
(Core 2 Duo >= 2.8GHz, 512MB+ GPU). They have various charts and
dialog screenshots showing different configurations for different
spec PCs for both city/urban areas and rural areas.

On my 3.8GHz i7 + GTX560Ti, I generally had the
autogen turned up to Extremely Dense, and the LOD Radius
set to 8.5 in the FSX.cfg file (this was part of the
configuration for Aerosoft’s Antarctica X, which runs
with “everything set to 11”).

I was switching back and forth between NZSI and
Antarctica, leaving the settings maxed out, and seeing
little or no drop in performance.

The only
exception was in the Christchurch area, which did require me to
back off slightly. I did also get some texture streaking
(primarily off a truck with a red cab) at these high settings and
with scenery shadows enabled. Turning off scenery shadows got rid
of that problem.

Airports
This is where we start to get into the meat of the package.
According to the blurb, “all major and many minor airports have
been upgraded”. Now, at the time of writing I haven’t visited
every airport in the scenery, but I’ve certainly been to the vast
majority, and I have yet to find one that hasn’t been enhanced.

For big tin fliers, the action is centred around Christchurch and
Queenstown, these being the main International hubs. Moving down
the food chain, the largest domestic regional airports are Nelson,
Dunedin and Invercargill, and there are sealed runways at most
towns capable of taking the smaller commuter craft.

GA fliers get the lion’s share of the airports (although there are
GA areas at even the biggest airports). There is an airport at
pretty much every town, and many grass airfields too. In addition
to enhancing the default airports, Orbx have also added quite a
few private airfields, some of which are challenging, with small,
sloping runways ideal for the bush pilot or adventurer.

In addition to this, there are several hundred unmarked grass
strips that don’t have AFCADs, so you won’t be able to find them
by looking at the FSX map view.

All the actual airports (I’m not talking about the unmarked strips
here) have lots of added detail: Custom buildings, terminals,
towers, hangars, animated wind socks, many other animations,
clutter, vehicles, static aircraft and rotorcraft, 3D grass,
custom ground markings. Some also have photographic ground
textures, and there are sheep grazing at many of the rural fields.

Just above my left wing is a small sloping grass strip…

Over all, the airfields give the impression of middle-end payware
/ top end freeware quality. Not up to the standard of a standalone
Orbx payware airport, but better than (say) UK2000 VFR, and on a
par with Aerosoft’s VFR German Airfields series. The bigger
airfields could
actually stand on their own as payware addons. Now, given the
number of totally new airfields, and the fact that they are just a
component of the overall scenery package, that’s actually a pretty
good standard. There is still room for really high quality airport
addons to take the scenery to the limit, but honestly, I would not
feel short changed paying the price of NZSI just for the airfields
alone. Certainly there are plenty of packages out there where you
pay more for less.

Zombie Flow
I mentioned other animations above. These include Orbx’s People
Flow and Nature Flow technologies at many of the airfields. Up
till now, this technology has only featured in Orbx’s addon
airports, but now it comes to the region itself. People Flow in
essence is animated human characters performing limited repetitive
tasks, such as drinking a beer on a bench, doing walk-around
checks on a plane, marshalling, cooking prawns on the barbecue,
walking back and forth, and so on. Nature Flow extends this to
vegetation, giving us swaying trees and grasses.

Unfortunately, the animation is very mechanical, and doesn’t look
particularly ‘natural’—hence the nickname ‘Zombie Flow’.
Similarly, the trees don’t so much sway in the breeze as beat time
in sync, like leafy metronomes.

Nevertheless, these technologies do add a degree of movement and
additional interest to the airfields, and these are ‘version 1’
implementations so can be considered experimental to some extent.
On balance though I think the added interest is beneficial. As
Joss Whedon would say, Grrr, Arrg.

Scenery
The Orbx style of customised landclasses really works well in
large areas of predominant wilderness, and NZSI is a good example
of that. There are large expanses of forest, mountains, plains,
and even farmland that are very convincing. In the mountains there
are glaciers, and these have Photoreal textures. Rivers too are
convincingly represented, particularly the braided alluvial rivers
that are characteristic of the Canterbury Plains.

Messing about on the river…

Vegetation has been customised with indigenous New Zealand flora,
so you will see flax, cabbage trees, tree ferns and so on. A
characteristic of farmland in New Zealand is the shelter belts --
lines of trees used as wind breaks, and these are particularly
prevalent on the Canterbury plains, where strong North Westerly
winds blow down from the Southern Alps. These shelter belts are
nicely positioned, and aligned to the field boundaries. Which
brings me on to autogen in general. This has been hand-placed
within the custom landclass tiles so that it exactly matches the
ground features. As a result the landscape as a whole is extremely
convincing. I was able to leave autogen set to Extremely Dense or
Very Dense most of the time, and experienced no stuttering or
streaking (other than the red-cab truck issue I mentioned earlier
with shadows enabled).

Lyttleton Harbour

The road system is made up from separate vector elements that are
drawn over the top of the landclass tiles, and as a result they
can (and often do) cut through ground features with no regard to
(e.g.) field boundaries, city blocks etc. This can be rather
jarring visually and is characteristic of this kind of scenery
(compared to, say, photo scenery). With the relatively low density
of roads in New Zealand, along with the carefully crafted
landclass tiles, Orbx have minimised this issue, and it only
really notices in urban areas.

Mountains and Glaciers
The 10 metre “Holgermesh” is extremely crisp and sharp. So far as
I know, it’s the highest resolution mesh commercially available,
and it makes a huge difference in the sharpness of the terrain.
Some of the ridges I “climbed” were so sharp and steep I nearly
had to cling on to the monitor for fear of falling off! Down low
though it can be a little lumpy and there are places where mesh
and roads for example don’t quite gel. I know this is a flight sim
and not a driving sim, but I do have a few drivable cars, and
sometimes I’ll just head off up a road for the sheer hell of it.
Anyhow, there’s a couple of cars at the bottom of a gorge
somewhere waiting for the AA man to turn up!

Low-level flying in the Buller Gorge

There are plenty of custom objects placed within the scenery too,
from lighthouses, to refineries, docks, ships, hydro dams, huts,
windfarms and so on, and these are great to find if you are a
low-and-slow (or not so slow…) pilot, and buzz them.

The Marlborough Sounds

The InterIslander ferry in the Marlborough Sounds is actually a
static model, although it is hoped that an AI ferry system might
be introduced along with the North Island scenery (the TSS
Earnslaw would be nice to have in an update too, chaps…)

Seasons
NZSI comes with a complete complement of seasons. These are
tempered to some extent by the maritime climate and so the changes
can seem quite subtle—a browning of the grass in Summer;
descending snow lines in Winter. In general, it’s colder in the
South than in the North (this is opposite to what we are used to
in the Northern hemisphere), and the most Southerly reaches are
prone to catching icy blasts from the Antarctic. Don’t forget that
the
seasons are also ‘reversed’, so December-March is Summer, and so
on. I’ve tried to mix the seasons in my screenshots.

Spring – Summer – Autumn – Winter –
Hard Winter

Night Lighting
FTX has its own 3D night lighting system, similar in concept to
that found in the Ultimate Terrain series. Street lights appear on
autogen lamp posts, and look very effective. The style and size of
the lighting effects can be controlled through the FTX 3D Lights
Tweaker utility (accessible through FTX Central), and a pair of
scripts will set ‘Day mode’ or ‘Night mode’. (Day mode disables
the 3D lamp posts for some improvement in frame rates.) This
system exists across several FTX titles, and there is a single set
of controls which operates globally.

Weather themes
There are six weather themes included in the package. If you have
other FTX packages installed, you will already have seen some or
all of them.

Finding the hidden gems
There are many points of interest, dams, lighthouses, wind farms,
unlisted airstrips etc. scattered throughout the scenery. Some of
them are shown on the included kmz file, or on aviation charts (if
you have access to them), others you would have to stumble across.
However, Harald Klose and Dieter Linde have provided a set of user
waypoint files for both Plan-G and FS Discover, which you can
download from the OZx community downloads site

Compatibility
VLC: The Vector Land Class product is a direct competitor for mesh
and landclass, which covers the entire of New Zealand. Normally
with such products it is an “either-or” situation and you much
choose which addon to use. But in this instance, Orbx don’t yet
have a product covering the North Island, so it is reasonable to
want both active at the same time. The VLC web site has
instructions for setting up your sim to use VLC in the North and
NZSI in the South.

Real New Zealand: Godzone Virtual Flight is working to make its
scenery compatible with NZSI. You should check their site for
progress and patches.

Verdict
NZSI is a well-rounded scenery package covering the South Island
of New Zealand. There’s something for everyone here, although it’s
mainly the low VFR guys that will get the most from this product.

Orbx sceneries have become the benchmark by which other sceneries
are judged. That’s a tough standard to live up to already, but
each new scenery pushes the bar even further forward, and this is
the best one yet. If you only buy once scenery area this year,
make it New Zealand: You will not be disappointed. 10/10 and a
Mutley’s Award for Excellence.